Web services Composition: A Story of Models, Automata and Logics
Rick Hull,
Bell Labs Research, Lucent Technologies, USA
Abstract
The web services paradigm promises to enable rich, flexible, and
dynamic interoperation of highly distributed and heterogeneous
web-hosted services. Substantial progress has already been made
towards this goal and industrial technology. Several
research efforts are already underway that build on or take advantage
of the paradigm but there
is still a long way to go, especially given the ostensible long-term
goal of enabling the automated discovery, composition, enactment,
and monitoring of collections of web services working to achieve
a specified objective.
A fundamental question right now concerns
the design and analysis of composite web services. Specifically,
are existing tools for design and analysis of software systems sufficient
for web services, or are new techniques needed to handle the
novel aspects of the web services paradigm? This raises a variety
of questions, several of which are relevant for the database research
community. These include: What is the right way to model web
services and their compositions? What is the right way to query
them in order to support automated composition and analysis algorithms?
And how can the data management aspects of composite
web services be incorporated into current web services standards?
This tutorial will provide the groundwork needed to address these
questions, by describing emerging frameworks for studying composite
services, and identifying emerging tools and techniques for
both automated design and analysis of composite web services.